Guest bloggers Ana Guimaraes and Eva Pelayo are activists who focus on helping others to become more aware and active in mitigating the effects of climate change. Together, they collaborated on creating a podcast that focuses on the importance of individual action as a catalyst to societal change. They make the switch to environmentally conscious behavior easier and fun through eco-challenges. Read more about their podcast here!
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Hello everyone. This is Vision Z and we are part of The Expressive Leaders Program at The Practice Space.
This post is about our project called the “Vision Z Podcast”. Our podcast is all about climate change, and the impacts of it, and how we can improve what we do in our everyday lives, to better the environment around us.
We hope that after you read this you will consider listening to our podcast, so you can be a part of our mission of saving mother Earth.
My name is Eva Angelina Pelayo. I am a freshman, and I live in Vallejo. I have a younger sibling and two parents, and some of my interests are reading, writing, Biology, learning about the world around me, and more reading.
And I am Ana. I am currently a 7th grader in Berkeley. I have 2 brothers and 2 supportive parents. I enjoy things like ballet, taekwondo, making jewelry, and of course making this podcast. I also run an eco-friendly jewelry business I am working on.
We believe that being able to take action and hold myself accountable for the times we mess up and make mistakes and learn from them makes us an expressive leader.
We also believe that being a good leader takes courage and a sense of responsibility.
The main issues that we care about addressing are the issues that surround climate change. Things like recycling, global warming, overfishing, endangered animals, things like this are very little paid attention to, but still have a big long-term effect, so we want to spread awareness about them. Because things like this, we have the most control over, and we want everyone including us to spend the time we could be on Instagram and those platforms, doing things that will benefit us and help Earth and the life inside it. We want to educate people about these things to help our planet.
Our project is about climate change and all aspects of it, how we contribute to it, and how we can help minimize harming the Earth and all life inside it.
We chose this project because we feel that this topic is not frequently talked about, and if it is, it is dismissed or pushed to the side, or people don’t believe in it, or people just believe that they have better things to do, or that it takes to much work ethic to do something like this. We want to be able to live in a better world where there is not just equality for everyone of all ages, colors, and gender but we want them/us to live a happy healthy life. Not just us but the people after us as well.
We had our inspirations for the project that helped us come together as one to make this project a possibility.
“Before I became an expressive leader, things that had to do with science and the environment around me had always intrigued me. And as I started learning about global warming, water pollution, changing weather patterns, I also learned that they were all from one category: Climate change. Climate change is not an important issue to a lot of people and Ana wants to change that,” says Eva.
Ana adds, “I was inspired by our planet today, I noticed that even little things could hurt our planet, so I wanted to educate people on how to help our planet. While learning how to teach people and making the podcast not only did you learn about climate change and the environment around us but I did too.”
Something not a lot of people know about this issue is that it affects all of us in more ways than one. Not only do our actions affect us but it also affects animals. For example, but not recycling you are contributing to water pollution, air pollution, and by us emitting excessive amounts of gas, we are contributing to more air pollution, something called global warming which melts ice caps, on which certain animals live on. By those animals losing the land they live on, it gets harder for them to adapt, which leads to death. Global warming is also not good for our health as well and can affect how we function in the long run.
This issue is important because the more we wait and not do anything, the worse it is going to get. That is why we have to take action now and find alternative ways to do other things that we would normally do that are currently affecting us and the environment. We shouldn’t have to wait until it is absolutely necessary to start doing something about it, because by that time it might be too late.
As part of our project, we created a podcast that talked about the issues involving climate change, and with that, we would give something called an “eco-challenge” to our listeners on the podcast, where they would have to either spread the word about climate change or make something that resembles what they are doing to help our environment.
To start this project we had set up a goal of what we wanted this podcast to do, and when we wanted to finish our project, where we had gotten help from our mentor Jumanah. We would start throwing ideas out on what we could do, and what our name for the podcast could be. Things like that. It was all kind of scrambled but after a while, we kind of got the hang of it and kind of fell into a routine.
Next, we will be moving onto our fourth episode of the podcast. We have done so much already, we have built a platform on anchor and Instagram with a good amount of followers and listeners. We have gotten people from around the world to listen. For example, people have listened to France, Dallas, Texas.
One challenge we have had is scheduling when we would have to meet up to write the script and record. Since we are both juggling school and other extracurricular activities like dance and taekwondo, we were pretty busy, so we would have a struggle figuring out when the other was available and when we were free.
Ana notes that “I learned how to balance my schedule and also learned how to make a successful podcast. I am still learning but I am very proud of where we are right now.”
Eva reflects “that there is quite a lot of talking. There are times where my voice would come out loud and raspy, or just normal. I remember always having to drink a lot of water, before, in between, and after rehearsal and the actual recording of an episode. I am still learning how to manage both school and this project, especially during our current situation, but I feel, little by little, that it’s getting easier.”
As a result of this project, we hope that we will get more listeners to take part in our project of spreading awareness that climate change really is a thing and it should be addressed, and with that find ways we can help preserve our environment and make life more sustainable, more clean, more…Earth.
What you can do to support our project is listening to our episodes, which come out every two weeks. Join the fun by completing our “eco-challenges”, telling us what you would like to know about climate change, and spreading awareness about it.
For more information you can visit https://anchor.fm/eva029, email us at vis.z.podcast@gmail.com, or message us on Instagram @_vision.z.podcast